I publish essays, reviews, and books on the intersection of Romantic literature, political theory, and philosophy.
My most recent book is The Fate of Progress in British Romanticism, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. I show how Romantic writers appropriated enlightened discourses of scientific and cultural progress from the eighteenth century, but drastically reoriented them so that they could capture and magnify the energies of religious and political dissent in their own time. Order it here:
My other books similarly explore complicated legacies of enlightenment political theorizing as they are explored in literary works. My first book, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, 2002) shows how poets and novelists imagined new institutional environments capable of encompassing increasingly visible communities of religious dissent. Order it here:
My second book explores a darker side of the institutional environments that interested me in my first book. In The Shadow of Death: Romanticism, Literature, and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton, 2007), I show how conflicting and intersecting ambitions surrounding Romantic-era penal reform shaped the imaginative efforts of writers from Wordsworth to Jane Austen. Order it here:
My third book, Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime, explores the issues of justice and injustice more directly from the points of view of literary aesthetics. If the Romantic age is often viewed as a pivotal moment of institutional change–political reform, abolition, women’s rights, and so on–this book investigates how literature depicted an aesthetic of change and changeability. I identify this aesthetic as the sublime–one in which aesthetically moved subjects feel both freed from given forms but moved to promote form itself. And I examine this aesthetic in a range of works by authors such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Immanuel Kant, and Mary Shelley.
I also edited a collection of critical essays on British Romantic literature, with a critical introduction and separate section introductions. The volume is organized around specific topics–from form and ideology to race and sexuality–that have animated discussion over the past several decades. Combining both “canonical” essays in the critical tradition with newly commissioned ones, it is an excellent guide and teaching tool for scholars and teachers.
Mark Canuel 